Eros and Civilization- A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud by Herbert Marcuse

Author:Herbert Marcuse [Marcuse, Herbert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2011-03-23T20:02:34.925000+00:00

complicated the "detour," the more differentiated and powerful the organism becomes : it finally conquers the globe as its dominion.

Still, the original goal of the instincts remains -- return to inorganic life, "dead" matter . Precisely here, in developing his most far-reaching hypothesis, Freud repeatedly states that exogenous factors determined the primary instinctual development: The organism was forced to abandon the earlier state of things "under the pressure of external disturbing forces"; the phenomena of organic life must be "attributed to external disturbing and divert ing influences"; decisive" external influences altered in such

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a way as to oblige the still surviving substance to diverge ever more widely from its original course of life." 6 If the organism dies "for internal reasons," 7 then the detour to death must have been caused by external factors. Freud assumes that these factors must be sought in "the history of the earth we live in and of its relation to the sun." 8 However, the development of the animal man does not remain enclosed in geological history; man becomes, on the basis of natural history, the subject and object of his own history. If, originally, the actual difference between life instinct and death instinct was very small, in the history of the animal man it grows to become an essential characteristic of the historical process itself.

The diagram on the facing page may illustrate Freud's construction of the basic instinctual dynamic.

The diagram sketches a historical sequence from the beginning of organic life (stages 2 and 3), through the formative stage of the two primary instincts (5), to their "modified " development as human instincts in civilization (6-7). The turning points are at stages 3

and 6. They are both caused by exogenous factors by virtue of which the definite formation as well as the subsequent dynamic of the instincts become "historically acquired." At stage 3, the exogenous factor is the " unrelieved tension " created by the birth of organic life; the "experience" that life is less "satisfactory," more painful, than the preceding stage generates the death instinct as the drive for relieving this tension through regression. The working of the death instinct

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thus appears as the result of the trauma of primary frustration: want and pain, here caused by a geological-biological event.

The other turning point, however, is no longer a geological-biological one: it occurs at the threshold of civilization. The exogenous factor here is Ananke, the conscious struggle for existence. It enforces the repressive controls of the sex instincts (first through the brute violence of the primal father, then through institutionalization and internalization), as well as the transformation of the death instinct into socially useful aggression and morality. This organization of the instincts (actually a long process) creates the civilized division of labor, progress, and law and order"; but it also starts the chain of events that leads to the progressive weakening of Eros and thereby to the growth of aggressiveness and guilt feeling. We have seen that this development is

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